


Choosing a Side

by Valmouth



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Choices, First Impressions, First Meetings, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-06
Updated: 2013-04-06
Packaged: 2017-12-07 15:55:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/750314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valmouth/pseuds/Valmouth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even his name is pretentious. Lestrade feels a prickle down his spine at the sound of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Choosing a Side

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer : I own no rights to these characters or to the fictional world they are derived from. I make no money from posting this and mean no offence by it.

When Lestrade first sees him, he wonders if Holmes the Elder is pulling some kind of prank. The man is a walking caricature, a cartoon from the Sunday papers. Mycroft Holmes has Civil Servant bleeding out of every pretentious pore of his body.

The suits may be fancy, the shoes may be beautiful, the ties may be silk, but Lestrade looks at it all and he doesn’t think much of Mycroft Holmes.

‘My brother _is_ the British Government,’ Sherlock says.

Lestrade usually thinks the British Government is pompous and overbearing, and when he sees Mycroft, the hazy distaste for authority suddenly has an image. And it’s faintly repellant. And fat.

He doesn't have a problem with the fat; he’s past forty and he’s no slender faun of young manhood himself anymore, if he ever bloody was, particularly now that he lives on disreputable takeaway and beer while sitting for hours behind a desk.

But no. He’s not impressed. He’d thought there was no way he could actively despise a man who combined basic good manners with the kind of high intellect that he respects in Sherlock and yet he does.

Mycroft Holmes offers a disturbingly soft, fleshy hand that feels cold even in summer. He smiles a closed-mouthed reptilian smile that doesn’t do much more than stretch his mouth and a few muscles in his saggy cheeks. And when he speaks, Lestrade gets the urge to be on the other side of the crime scene with Sherlock cruelly baiting anyone who gets in his way.

The thing is, Lestrade thinks, the thing is that Sherlock doesn’t pretend. He doesn’t hide his lack of caring, his impatience, his belief that ‘normal’ people are stupid and lazy. Sherlock also doesn’t hide his reactions unless he's trapping criminals or drawing statements out of witnesses.

Mycroft, on the other hand, bestows a gracious smile and shakes hands with just the right amount of pressure and he says things that are intelligent and light and good-mannered, and Lestrade gets the distinct impression that he has been weighed, found wanting, but kept around because Mycroft likes observing the local wildlife.

A pet policeman- how novel!

Lestrade feels his hackles rise, along with his bile, and he cuts the conversation short in mid-sentence to relay a message to his Sergeant that doesn’t exist. Just to get away.

Sherlock is hunched over the body with his little plastic-y magnifying thing out and Anderson looks like he might need major dental work in another year, he’s grinding his teeth so hard.

Mycroft has vanished when Lestrade turns back around and for the first time in an hour, Lestrade feels enormous relief. Even with a corpse at his feet and a team perpetually on the edge of mutiny.

“You hated him,” Sherlock observes.

“What?”

Lestrade isn’t that stupid. He knows what Sherlock’s talking about, because Sherlock hasn’t specified. And to Sherlock, there is only ever one ‘Him’. The ‘Him’ that crowns every other ‘Him’ on this planet.

“Mycroft.”

Dear God, even the name is pretentious. Deadening. Spidery. Lestrade feels a prickle down his spine just at the sound of it.

“I don’t have an opinion,” Lestrade says calmly, “Barely met the man. What d’you think of the body, then?”

Sherlock doesn’t answer him for just a second, content to smile viciously and victoriously, content to look his triumph and unspoken understanding before he whirls on his heel and stalks back to the body, already running through the excruciatingly long list of facts he has deduced with hands, eyes, smell and taste from one dead body and an empty art gallery.

‘A minor post in traffic,’ Mycroft simpered.

There are a lot of places where crime and traffic intersect. When he first heard the name ‘Mycroft’, he’d had a wild moment of hope. To return to solving his own crimes, in his own way, with perhaps some additional assistance from On High. A name to open a few doors. Ease Sherlock out, coax Mycroft in.

He follows on Sherlock’s heel.

He chooses his Holmes, and he doesn’t look back.


End file.
